This blog is meant to allow Fragment-based Drug Design Practitioners to get together and discuss NON-CONFIDENTIAL issues regarding fragments.

02 January 2015

Fragment events in 2015

Happy 2015! Lots of exciting events coming up this year - hope to see you at one!

Newly Added! The American Chemical Society is organizing a series of FREE Thursday webinars on Drug Design and Delivery. They all look fun; readers of this blog may be particularly interested in Designing Better Drug Candidates (January 29, by Paul Leeson), Fragment-Based Drug Design Strategies (March 19, by yours truly), PAINS (May 28, by Jonathan Baell), and X-ray Crystallography in Drug Discovery (July 30, by Jon Mason and Miles Congreve).
February 17-18: SELECTBIO is holding its Discovery Chemistry Congress in Berlin, Germany, with a number of talks on fragment-based lead discovery.

March 22-24: The Royal Society of Chemistry will be holding Fragments 2015 in Cambridge, UK, the fifth in the illustrious series organized by RSC-BMCS. You can read impressions of Fragments 2013 and Fragments 2009.

August 11-13: The OMICS Group is holding a conference entitled Drug Discovery & Designing in Frankfurt, Germany, with FBDD listed as a conference highlight. I confess I've never heard of this group, so if anyone has attended one of their events please leave a comment.

December 15-20: Finally, I'm helping to organize the first ever Pacifichem Symposium devoted to fragments in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Pacifichem conferences are held every 5 years and are designed to bring together scientists from Pacific Rim countries including Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and the US. There is lots of activity in these countries, and since travel to mainland US and Europe is onerous this should be a great opportunity to meet many new folks - in Hawaii no less! Abstract submissions are now open, and we're giving preference to people and organizations that have not presented before.

I have been to two Med Chem and Drug Designing Conferences of OMICS. The first one was mediocre at best, quite chaotic, the second one was better, with a line up of quite good talks. Sponsors and delegates included Genentech, Novartis, Roche and others. Certainly doesn't belong to the big shots of conferences, but then again, they are not so expensive either, which might have a positive effect on travel budget and allowance.